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Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

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Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#491

Post by gandutraveler »

greggman2 wrote: post #474
Plyphon_ wrote: post #464

In their defence (not the defence of the WYSIWYG box itself) - they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability, etc etc. You have to remember Slack's target persona is probably no longer the Engineer (If it ever was) - it's more likely a much less tech-savvy employee who finds WYSIWYG editors very handy to create rich text inputs. I guess…

> they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability I have never worked at a company that did user testing or if they did it was always done in a way or interpreted in a way to back up the designer's opinion. I don't think I've once in my entire 40 yr career seen a designer test with users, find out something was bad, and change their design…

Most of the established large tech companies do User experience research sessions while doing several iterations of mocks during the process. This is prior to AB testing. My current and last company both followed this practice.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#492

Post by arrrg »

greggman2 wrote: post #474
Plyphon_ wrote: post #464

In their defence (not the defence of the WYSIWYG box itself) - they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability, etc etc. You have to remember Slack's target persona is probably no longer the Engineer (If it ever was) - it's more likely a much less tech-savvy employee who finds WYSIWYG editors very handy to create rich text inputs. I guess…

> they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability I have never worked at a company that did user testing or if they did it was always done in a way or interpreted in a way to back up the designer's opinion. I don't think I've once in my entire 40 yr career seen a designer test with users, find out something was bad, and change their design…

That’s shocking that you have never seen this.

I agree that there is a temptation to not do it, especially for smaller changes, especially if time is tight, especially if you are a smaller company, and all of that is certainly a problem.

But no user testing? Not changing the design? We just recently drastically changed the design of a new product we are developing because it failed initial user testing (with clients of us who came in for user testing using a paper prototype).

What followed were also several rounds of design critique sessions with the revised design (bringing in internal people who had nothing to do with the design and ask them for their constructive feedback, without aiming to find a solution to what they find during that meeting) and we will bring those original clients back in in December and sit them in front of the then working prototype.

We are a small company and I do agree that we do this far too infrequently but from my viewpoint as someone who makes the design I couldn’t even imagine not reacting to people who clearly have trouble with the design. Because I did the design. I know that it’s made of thousands of little decisions, thousands of little trade-offs you have to make. I know that it’s a hard problem and that it’s easy to make mistakes or to fundamentally misunderstand something about the mental model the users have. So any information about what works and what doesn’t is extremely valuable.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#493

Post by janwh »

I want to encourage everyone who doesn't like the WYSIWYG input box to use `/feedback` directly from within Slack to let the folks over there know about it. I believe this is one of those occasions in which tons of user feedback is crucial to at least make that awful thing optional.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#494

Post by TeMPOraL »

ako wrote: post #385
shantly wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really demoralizing to be on a team on which the devs clearly have better design and UX sense than the designer(s) and/or product manager. But not the titles—they're "just" software developers who couldn't possibly understand users or design or common friggin' sense.

Maybe they have statistics that indicate that their larges user group by now isn't capable of using markdown? Most non-techies are not aware of markdown.

Maybe they have, maybe they don't. Or maybe they can pull some out of their behinds on the spot when asked (which I suspect is the most likely case).

If non-techies can be taught how threading or bunch of other Slack idiosyncrasies work, they can as easily be taught that surrounding text with characters like *, /, ~, _ and ` changes formatting. It's a trivial concept. Reddit, or countless Internet forums before, never had a problem with teaching that to non-techies.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#495

Post by sambe »

This is not one of those "oh, that's annoying, i'll have to remember that and learn to work around it" issues. It's more like "I want to immediately stop using this software but have no choice". Its driving me crazy - Slack is all text input. Don't break text input dummy!

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#496

Post by narrowtux »

pbreit wrote: post #305
jdoliner wrote: post #155

I've been suffering from this one too so I'll share the most annoying part for me. I frequently have reasons to type out glob patterns generally in backticks. The interface for this is completely broken in the new WYSIWYG editor. Here's what happens when I try to type: `/ / `, things work normally up until the second " " at which point the "/" between them becomes gets bolded, which makes no sense, because you can't…

Your asterisk example works OK for me. As does the blog writer's "when you do `foo()` it foos the bar".

Yeah, seems this was fixed pretty quickly by not parsing the ` immediately but only after you've entered the closing `

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#497

Post by jeltz »

bmarkovic wrote: post #414
Arathorn wrote: post #35

Amusingly, for https://riot.im we just shelved our WYSIWYG editor efforts after trying two completely separate implementations over the years (one via Draft.js, the other via Slate.js) because: a) it's a nightmare to get right, b) nobody used it anyway (it was optional), c) chat isn't a wordprocessor, d) markdown (commonmark) + floating formatting toolbar is good enough. Our current editor was written from scratch (c…

The fact that this industry turned to a proprietary low-quality solution like Slack when Riot/Matrix have already existed tells the full story about what a bunch of incompetent idiots we all are. Everyone frustrated with the new Slack input box deserves what they got. Me included.

Slack predates Riot by quite a lot.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#498

Post by randunel »

kdeldycke wrote: post #454
james_s_tayler wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhh the HIPPO strikes again.

HiPPO stands for HIghest Paid Person's Opinion , a trait of dysfunctional culture, in which power politics trumps data. The concept seems to originate from Netscape's CEO and the acronym exists since 2006, according HiPPO FAQ: http://bitly.com/HIPPOExplained

Why are you trying to track us? Please post non-tracking links https://exp-platform.com/Pages/HiPPO_explained.aspx

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#499

Post by thatguyagain »

greggman2 wrote: post #474
Plyphon_ wrote: post #464

In their defence (not the defence of the WYSIWYG box itself) - they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability, etc etc. You have to remember Slack's target persona is probably no longer the Engineer (If it ever was) - it's more likely a much less tech-savvy employee who finds WYSIWYG editors very handy to create rich text inputs. I guess…

> they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability I have never worked at a company that did user testing or if they did it was always done in a way or interpreted in a way to back up the designer's opinion. I don't think I've once in my entire 40 yr career seen a designer test with users, find out something was bad, and change their design…

I work for a relatively large global tech company (100k+ employees), and our UX teams does this all the time. First they come up with a design they _think_ will work, then do user testing, and often the user is confused or doesn't like a specific thing - could be a button color or an entire flow - and we change it. Then repeat.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#500

Post by ck425 »

izietto wrote: post #486
Plyphon_ wrote: post #464

In their defence (not the defence of the WYSIWYG box itself) - they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability, etc etc. You have to remember Slack's target persona is probably no longer the Engineer (If it ever was) - it's more likely a much less tech-savvy employee who finds WYSIWYG editors very handy to create rich text inputs. I guess…

IMHO they missed the fact that power users would have preferred the old behavior and didn't provide the opportunity to switch between the two behaviors

This. Power users (normally engineers) drove Slack usage at my last company. I'm now in an org that uses Teams and all the engineers want to use Slack. Likely won't happen but it's important to note that this feature isn't just annoying a small segment of users, it's annoying the small segment that are most vocal about adopting Slack. And who due to economic power arguably have more influence.
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